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Round 1: 8 Groups with 4 engines, each engine have to play 12 games.Round 2: 4 Groups with 4 engines, each engine have to play 24 games.Round 3: 2 Groups with 4 engines, each engine have to play 24 games.Round 4: 2 Groups with 4 engines, each engine have to play 48 games.

Engines with reached place 17-32 = 12 gamesEngines with reached place 9-16 = 36 gamesEngines with reached place 1-8 = 104 games

672 games are to play. This need on my 4 Quad Core systems around 35 days.

- game Download with GUI comments possible after each round.- 16 replay-zone, games with GUI comments

LIVE result table can be found on my start page.More detailed information can be found on my German "Aktuell / Actual" page.

And now, have fun with this SWCR Champions-League 2011 in football WM mode with the best for me available TOP-32 engines!

I have a question about using the Nalimov tables in Fritz12 GUI when setting a tournament.How do you ensure that each program uses F12's tables?Do you need to just check 'use tablebases' for each engine?Or do you also need, in the engine parameters, to indicated the path to F12 GUI's own Nalimov tables?

I have a question about using the Nalimov tables in Fritz12 GUI when setting a tournament.How do you ensure that each program uses F12's tables?Do you need to just check 'use tablebases' for each engine?Or do you also need, in the engine parameters, to indicated the path to F12 GUI's own Nalimov tables?

David

Hello David,

after my information the FritzBases are position databases, not directly endgame databases. I don't believe that the FritzBases are very important. I test the latest Fritz versions with and without FritzBases and can't see a different.

In the first group I play in SWCR Champions-League I made a mistake with "GUI used endgame databases" under Shredder Classic GUI. Now the complete tournament without "GUI used endgame databases"! My first idea, because I will see the engines and not the databases.

First SWCR Champions-League 2011 games are online now.Have fun with my tournament.

LOSSRybka 4.0Replay the game »There may be a new top dog in the world of computer chess software.

In a competition called Thoresen Computer Engines Competition, named for Martin Thoresen, who is evidently the organizer, a program called Houdini is in the lead.

That is remarkable as the event includes Rybka, a program that has won the last four computer world chess championships.

What is also remarkable is that Houdini is apparently shareware — that is, it is free.

In addition to Houdini and Rybka, the other programs in the tournament are Stockfish (another free program), Naum, Hiarcs, Critter (which is also free), Ivanhoe (yet another open-source program), and Shredder.

The competition is a double round-robin format, meaning that each program plays all the others twice, once with each color.

The Bilbao Scoring System is being used in which each win counts as 3 points and each draw as 1. With half of the sixth round completed, Houdini is leading with 13 points (and has yet to play its sixth game), Stockfish is in second with 9 points, Rybka is third with 8, Naum is in fourth with 7, Ivanhoe is in fifth with 6, and Critter, Hiarcs and Shredder are tied for last with 4 points each.

The games can be followed live on Chessbomb in the TCEC S1 Division 1 room.

Austin TXJanuary 12th, 20116:25 pmAs a long-time chess player & computer geek, I've really been enjoying this event for the last few days. This event doesn't have the man versus machine overtones of the 2003 Kasparov-DeepJunior matchup, but it's still interesting to watch this battle of the eight best available chess engines play out.

Houdini is remarkable in that it is a free chess engine developed by one individual (Robert Houdart) as a hobby, but it's also remarkable that the other free engines are doing so well. Any one of these commercial or free chess engines running on even modest PC hardware can now beat any Grandmaster alive.

On various internet chess forums, some of the commercial developers like to cry foul when a free engine beats their for-pay creations, insinuating that stolen intellectual property is the basis of of the free engine's success. But most commercial developers also admit that they freely use ideas and even snippets of code from existing open-source chess engines, and offer no hard proof that developers of free chess engines are doing anything different.

Kudos have to be given to Martin Thoresen, a programmer and computer chess afficionado who set up the TCEC website and the hardware to allow these engines to compete. There are a number of established chess-engine rating sites that will play many blitz games (chess played with very fast time restrictions) to evaluate new engines, but Mr. Thoresen's TCEC site is using a single very high-end PC (a six-core Intel Core i7 980x overclocked to 4303 MHz) and long time controls (initial 40 moves in 100 minutes, per engine). That's unique, and attracting a fair amount of attention. Using one very fast PC to play the games one-at-a-time also adds a bit of suspense to the proceedings, and allows computer chess geeks to chat during the live play on sites like Chessdom/Chessbomb mentioned in this NYTimes blog entry (http://livechess.chessdom.com/site).

Anyone interested in playing chess against one of these free engines can download a free GUI (a graphic interface that displays the chessboard and interacts with the user) and any of the free engines, all of which now conform to a standard protocol to talk to chess GUIs. I'd recommend getting the free gui Arena (http://www.playwitharena.com) which comes with several basic engines built in. After playing with the basic engines for a while, you can download and install Houdini (http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm) or Stockfish (http://www.stockfishchess.com).

your tournament conditions are better and mr thoresen use a high end computer.but the best of all your games are free available.so you have to get more popularity than mr thoresen.many thanks for good job and dont lose your chess enthusiasm.

@Rossky wrote:your tournament conditions are better and mr thoresen use a high end computer.but the best of all your games are free available.so you have to get more popularity than mr thoresen.many thanks for good job and dont lose your chess enthusiasm.

Hi,

important is that we can reproduce games. With more as 1 core it's often not possible. The reason that I used 1 core only. More as one core is interesting for analyses, not for a good eng-eng test. Programmer should repduced engine mistakes, thats what I like. Ponder = on is very important too (could be 30-40 ELO more, have a look in the Crafty 23.3 x64 results in my SWCR rating list). The hardware he used is better. I have 8 matches still running on 4x Q9550 systems and I can produce a lot of games. I believe my time control is clearly higher as the time control Mr. Thoresen is using for his great event.

I like the work Mr. Thoresen do for us so much and I think we need more as one Mr. Thoresen to make computer chess more popular. I think one review at this site is enough. Mr. Thoreson created clear better webpages I can do. So its nice to see that the right pages with the right person will get the full public attention.

And to the NewYork times.In the time I am working with Martin Blume as two-men-team we make Arena available on x freeware pages around the World. Around 3.5 Million downloads I had on my server in the year 2005 / 2006. A daily newspaper in Argentina set a smal review about the project on the titel page. We got around 30.000 hits in these days from Argentina only. A good known German IT newspager with a big download page to freeware set Arena on his page. Only two programs got in this months more downloads (one of this programs are AntiVir). Important is not a name, important is the product. A name is today popular and tomorrow out. A name isn't important for a development.

For myself isn't important that I am popular, more important is that computer chess will get more attention and the work the programmers and his testers do for us (most do it for free) will get more attention. I have in my brain to animate a little bit.

You are speaking with a person with try such things in computer chess around 10 years.

That's all !!Have fun with my little event, I hope I can produce interesting analyze material.

@Rossky wrote:your tournament conditions are better and mr thoresen use a high end computer.but the best of all your games are free available.so you have to get more popularity than mr thoresen.many thanks for good job and dont lose your chess enthusiasm.

Hi,

I have a look again in the hardware from Mr. Thoresen.Fantastic system, a lot of nps. A lot faster as my systems.Great little tourneys Martin is playing. Perfect presentation!

A wonderful page!I made a link in front of my SWCR Champions-League 2011 page.

I have different problems but all is to manage. I added information to this tourney in my German actual page, can be translate with google in front of this site. It's a bit work to organice and managed all but why not. I think it's very interesting to have such an tourney with longer time controls and with many games and included engines.